Age at First Drink, Experiences of Drunkenness, and Alcohol-Related Problems in Canadian Youth: Is Early Onset Bad If You Are a Moderate Drinker?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This article examines early age at first drink (AFD) (14 years and younger) and alcohol-related problems, with a focus on experiences of drunkenness. It challenges the assumption that all early AFD is harmful by investigating whether early drinkers who typically consume alcohol in moderation experience minimal problems or harms. METHOD: Participants were drawn from the 2012 Student Drug Use Survey in Canada's Atlantic Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador, an anonymous cross-sectional survey of high school students (ages 15-19 years). Negative binomial regression techniques were used to assess alcohol problems and harms (12-item scale) in association with early-onset drinking. RESULTS: Among ever-drinking high school students (n = 4,752), 65% had their first drink before age 15, 73% reported having ever been drunk, and 55% indicated at least one alcohol-related problem in the past 12 months, with a mean of 1.39 problems. Analyses revealed that experiencing an alcohol-related problem was more strongly associated with ever being drunk than with early AFD. Modeled together, individuals who reported early AFD and who had never been drunk reported significantly fewer problems relative to individuals who reported early AFD and late AFD but had been drunk. CONCLUSIONS: Early AFD is commonly linked to alcohol-related problems in youth and is predictive of future alcohol-related harms in adulthood. However, considerable heterogeneity in the likelihood of suffering alcohol-related problems exists, contextualized by individual drinking patterns. Given the high prevalence of early AFD, harm minimization efforts could achieve greater success by directing youth to consume alcohol in moderation, rather than focusing solely on abstinence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".